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Article from recent Photography Week
(© Sony)
Smartphones have evolved to become some of the best point-and-shoot cameras ever made in recent years, and they might soon take another leap forward thanks to an innovative new Sony image sensor.
Sony’s semiconductor division has made the world’s first stacked CMOS sensor with two-layer transistor pixels. Today’s CMOS sensors have both their photodiodes and pixel transistors on the same substrate (or layer), but on Sony’s new chip these components are on two separate layers.
So what does this mean for image quality? Sony says this new architecture doubles the saturation signal level of each pixel, effectively exposing them to twice as much light. This in turn should significantly improve the sensor’s dynamic range, while also freeing up enough room for larger amp transistors to help reduce night-time noise.
The benefits should be particularly apparent in high-contrast scenes, which earlier smartphones struggled with. Today’s phones use clever multi-frame processing to improve their dynamic range, but this new Sony sensor should give their software a head start.
Sony hasn’t said how close it is to mass-producing its new sensors, but did specify that its new design would “contribute to the realization of increasingly high-quality imaging such as smartphone photographs”.
This is significant because Sony is by far the biggest manufacturer of smartphone camera sensors, with around 42% of the global market, and recent teardowns of the iPhone 13 Pro Max show that it uses three Sony IMX 7-series sensors.
The new sensor could also be good news for mirrorless cameras, but the gains are likely to be most significant for smaller phone sensors, which is where Sony is focusing its attention for now. ■
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